bang
by sugar free vanilla
Summary: "This is the way your world ends. Not with a whimper, but a bang." Cops & Robbers AU. Oneshot.


**This is a fill from an anon prompt on my tumblr (castleholic), which I'll post at the end. Majorly angsty. This is only my second attempt at the second person but I hope you enjoy it!**

**Thanks to Iso for her beta-ing and compliments. You're my favourite.**

_This is the way the world ends  
>This is the way the world ends<br>This is the way the world ends  
>Not with a bang but a whimper.<em>

_- The Hollow Men, T.S Eliot_

* * *

><p>Your world ends in a shuddering blast.<p>

You feel it a fraction of a second before the sound even registers, the shockwave shaking the mobile command centre, knocking the air from your lungs -

- or… no.

That's not the jolt. That's _him._

Or rather the paralysing fear that he's no longer here to take your breath away in person.

Time slows - or speeds - or perhaps for everyone else it passes as normal - but you, at least are suspended in this horror.

The crashing thunder of the explosion won't stop, rings in your ears and clatters your brain against your skull.

Your heart is in your throat and your stomach and one stuttering, broken, thump away from giving up.

He cannot be dead.

You lurch to your feet, unsteady on legs that feel not to be your own. The world is spinning, floor swinging in sickening waves; is that your imagination or the aftermath of the-

C-4?

The name of the explosive sticks, even in your thoughts. It's cloying and clawing and choking and you _can't breathe._

There's a shove at your shoulder and you swing around blindly, seeing but not recognising this man and who _is _he? And - oh. The captain. Peterson.

You nod blankly in acknowledgement, walk or stumble or float to the door; you don't know, you don't feel, you can't tell which - following the pull in your chest, the one that causes you to gravitate towards him in every which way.

And then you see the wreckage.

Billowing clouds of suffocating destruction force moisture from your mouth and settle against the burning lining of your fragile lungs, sting your wide eyes and cling to your trembling lashes.

Your scream catches in your throat, releases in the tiniest of exhales - a whimper.

The resignation of the sound tears your soul apart anew.

The captain is talking, now, but you're only just clinging to lucidity-

Pull yourself together, Kate.

Your partner's in there.

(_Or at least what's left of him.)_

You swallow that supposition with a shudder.

* * *

><p>They try to stop you going in there. They fail. <em>He's my partner, <em>is a vehement utterance on your tongue, some desperate blur between a hiss and a plea.

He's your partner and…

Everything else.

You think that Peterson may be putting two and two together to make four.

Four being that you're stupidly, recklessly in love with Richard Castle. Whom may (or may not be) dead.

A reluctant nod and you're in, stride breaking into a run without you consciously realising. His name is a mantra, spilling from your lips again and again _and again and again and_ _again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…_

The bank smells like charred flesh and burning hair.

Your legs give way when you see it, lying somehow unscathed on the marble of the floor. A little moleskine notebook that you recognise - how could you not? It never leaves his person.

Except his person is nowhere to be found.

You bite your cheek to keep your silence, teeth sinking deep into the soft flesh until liquid copper floods your tastebuds.

You sweep up the pad, cradle it in your palms as though it's a precious thing. To you, it is.

And then '_Castle!' _rips from your body in a wretched shout, even as you push up on quivering limbs.

Even as you know from the carnage that you're now facing that he won't be able to answer.

You must've seen a thousand dead bodies in your time - will see a thousand more - but the sight that's in front of you sets your stomach rolling until it heaves right out of your body, a putrid mess that in no way compares to the sight of smoking flesh, limbs torn from torsos and thrown metres across the room.

Still, your legs carry you over there.

You see him.

He's-

dead.

You love him.

He doesn't know.

He's dead and you love him and he doesn't know; he never knew.

You tell him now. Pull him up to rest him on your lap, positioning him so that you can't see the section of spinal cord thats ripped through his flesh and juts through the nape of his neck in a sickening display of white bone and scarlet blood, congealed in places to a loathsome brown.

And you tell him.

You tell him as you smooth his hair over his forehead, study the chiselled features of his face up close, the way you never allowed yourself to do when he was alive. Your eyes fix on his - glazed, unseeing, but you know that look; that far away gaze he affects when inspiration strikes, when he loses himself in that bright, beautiful imagination of his.

You tell him as your tears splash against his cheeks, settle in his lashes. As though he's crying for you as you cry for him.

You tell him until the three words blur into one shattered sob of truth, the shards of your honesty ricocheting from his unhearing ears to lodge in your traitorously still-beating heart.

* * *

><p>When they pull you away from him, you lash out - scratching and hitting and horrendous insults streaming from you until the anger seeps away and all you are left with is despair.<p>

It's not until you see _her _that you remember your promise.

_I promise you that they are going to be okay._

The memory bites at you, scorches like acid at the ragged edges of the gaping hole in your heart.

"Alexis."

She doesn't hear or maybe she ignores you. You wouldn't blame her.

_They're all I've got. Do you hear me? They're all I've got._

The splintered glass of your broken heart crumbles to sand.

* * *

><p>The water burns you.<p>

That's good. That means you can feel.

You don't know how long you've been sat under the scald of the shower. Rocking back and forth in the tub as the explosion rattles in your cranium.

The harsh laugh barks from you without permission, scrapes at your throat and scratches at the steam rising from the cast iron beneath you.

For you realise that T.S. Eliot got it desperately wrong.

* * *

><p>This is the way your world ends,<p>

_Not_ with a whimper, but a bang.

* * *

><p><strong>Prompt: The C4 in the bank (Cops &amp; Robbers) kills the hostages as well as the mercs.<strong>


End file.
